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Akbar's “Jesus” and Marlowe's “Tamburlaine”

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Akbar's “Jesus” and Marlowe's “Tamburlaine” Akbar’s “Jesus” and Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine”: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness AZFAR MOIN The University of Texas at Austin [email protected] Abstract: This essay explores a strange parallel in the way that sovereignty was imagined in early modern South Asia and Europe. At the end of the sixteenth century, when the Mughal emperor Akbar embraced Christian messianic symbols and Catholic icons to make himself the most sacred being on earth, the English playwright Christopher Marlowe used the myth of Akbar’s world-conquering ancestor from Inner Asia, Timur or Tamburlaine, to fashion an enduring drama about the ultimate sovereign. The questions why Akbar in India turned to Jesus while Marlowe in England focused on Timur throw new light on the nature of religion and kingship across early modern Eurasia. The Mughal emperors of India were obsessed with Jesus. They adorned their palaces and tombs with Catholic icons.1 They titled their queens “Mary.”2 They had their princes tutored by Jesuit priests, who had been invited to the imperial court in the late sixteenth century.3 In imperial paintings, the emperors had themselves depicted alongside Christ, and sometimes even as Christ.4 We can imagine the Jesuits’ initial elation— and eventual perplexity—at the fervor with which the Mughals, a Sunni Muslim dynasty of Inner Asian origins, embraced the signs of their faith. This was true not only for the “free thinkers” among the Mughals, like Akbar (1556–1605) and Jahangir (1605–1627), but also for the allegedly more “orthodox” ones like Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658). There exists at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., an enigmatic painting in which the builder of the Taj Mahal is marked by a halo linked to the heavens by rays of light (Figure 1).5 In the light hovers a dove, the Holy Ghost, and above the clouds is God the Father. In place of the Son, though, is Shah Jahan, rendered in perfect profile, the very form of sovereignty. In a recent book, The Millennial Sovereign, I discussed the talismanic use of Christian and European-style art in the messianic self-fashioning of the Mughals, which took place at the end of the first Islamic millen- nium.6 I revisit some of these arguments in this exploratory essay, but with a different end in mind. I examine here a strange parallel between the cultural histories of early modern India and England. In the late six- teenth century, while the emperor Akbar, a proud heir of Timur (d. 1405), was using Christian iconography in his theater of sovereignty, the young Fragments Volume 3 (2013–2014) 1 MOIN: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness Figure 1: Shah Jahan with Asaf Khan (detail from folio). The late Shah Jahan Album. Painted by Bichitr, c. 1650. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper mounted on paperboard, 36.9 x 25.3 cm. Source: © Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase— Smithsonian Unrestricted Trust Funds, Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program, and Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, S1986.403 Fragments Volume 3 (2013–2014) 2 MOIN: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness Christopher Marlowe was ushering in a new age of theater in Elizabethan England, with a play based on Timur, called Tamburlaine the Great.7 Why Akbar embraced “Jesus” in India and why Marlowe was inspired by “Timur” in England are questions that, when considered together, open up a new perspective on the religious and political imagination linking these distant regions. As the essay’s title shows, the analysis here is indebted to Strange Parallels, the second volume of Victor Lieberman’s landmark work on early modern Eurasia.8 The nature of this debt will become clear as the different fragments of the argument fall into place. For now, let us begin with a closer look at why the Mughals were drawn to Jesus. Was it all propaganda—a boast that the Mughals of India were holier than the God of the Franks? If so, the question arises: Why Christianity? Would Islamic and Indic symbols not have been more relevant to the Mughals for making such divine assertions? There was not a Christian constituency to speak of in Mughal India, or for that matter, in Iran or Central Asia, the places from which much of the Mughal nobility hailed. And though Jesus and Mary were Islamic figures mentioned in the Quran, their use in the ceremony and pomp of sovereignty was rare in the broader history of Muslim kingship; the staple myths of sacred kingship were those of Solomon, Alexander, and the heroes of the pre-Islamic Iranian epic, the Shahnama (Book of Kings). At first glance, it seems that the Mughals’ turn to Jesus occurred in India. The first two Mughal rulers, Babur and Humayun, who had spent more of their lives in Central Asia and Iran, had not marked themselves with Christian signs and names. The process appears to have begun with Akbar and his invitation to the Jesuits in the late 1570s to participate in the religious discussions at his court. And today the matter seems so bi- zarre that it receives little more than a passing mention in the standard histories of the Mughal empire, and more as cultural marginalia than as serious politics. Art historians have paid the phenomenon greater at- tention because of the quantity and quality of Catholic-themed images produced at the Mughal court.9 But, for the most part, besides cataloging and describing this Mughal fixation—and in a few cases making fun of it—the art historical approach only takes us so far in making sense of it. But make sense of it we must, for it is a trace of the strong cultural link that the Mughals had with Europe. Today we tend to classify the Mughals with the Ottomans, the other “Sunni Muslim” empire of early modern times, and expect the two to reveal synchronized cultural behavior.10 This, however, is not how history unfolded. While the Ottomans also had a Turkic, nomadic heritage, and borrowed much from the Turkmen and Timurid court cultures of fifteenth-century Iran, by the time they had set up in Istanbul and the Mughals in Delhi and Agra, there was little formal contact between the two dynasties.11 The Mughals enjoyed greater cultural Fragments Volume 3 (2013–2014) 3 MOIN: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness exchange with the Safavids of Iran, their immediate neighbors, and with their seafaring contemporaries from Western Europe. They considered the Safavids, fellow adherents of Timurid kingly norms, a civilized people. But they thought of the “Franks” as a peculiar maritime tribe, nomads patrolling the seas, whose kings were not wealthy enough to send proper gifts.12 Thus it is between Iran and Europe that we must search for an answer to the Mughals’ mysterious love of Jesus. Let us turn first to Iran. The early history of the Mughals in the days of the first two dynasts, Babur (r. 1526–1530) and Humayun (r. 1530–1556), is entangled with the rise of the Safavids in Iran. In the first half of the sixteenth century, it was the Safavids who made the Timurid princes of Central Asia and India their clients, and styled themselves as the true suc- cessors of Timur (r. 1370–1405), the Mughals’ Inner Asian ancestor who had become a major symbol of sovereignty after his conquests swept across nearly all of Asia.13 Today, the Safavids’ suzerainty over the Mughals and their embrace of Timurid norms receives little notice. There are two reasons for this neglect. First, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Mughals’ imperial project in India was so successful that they eclipsed their former Iranian overlords in wealth and power, and staked a viable and independent claim as worthy legatees of Timur. Second, at this time, the Safavids began to impose doctrinal Shi’ism on Iran and thus became known as sectarian devotees of Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam. It is Ali whom the Shi’is consider the rightful heir of his father-in-law and first cousin, the prophet Muhammad, and as leader of all Muslims. Since the Safavids decreed the conversion of Iran’s population to doc- trinal Shi’ism, there is good reason to think of them as a quintessential Shi’i dynasty. But such a categorization does not capture the spirit of their first century of rule. As they conquered Iran, the Safavids fashioned their sovereignty around Ali in a mode that was neither doctrinal nor juristic but epic. The Safavids rose to power by enacting a messianic myth of Ali.14 The religious climate of fourteenth and fifteenth century Iran and Cen- tral Asia was dominated by what scholars call “Alid loyalty,” a popular, excessive devotion to Ali, kept alive in oral legends that portrayed him as the perfect saint and warrior. In the aftermath of the social and political dislocations wrought by the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century, the region was awash in Sufi movements whose leaders claimed to be the messianic embodiment of Ali. Also prominent in this milieu was a strand of Islamic belief known as ghulat or “exaggeration” in which the spiritual guide was venerated as the godhead. In the late fifteenth century, the Safavids had incubated such an exaggerated messianic enterprise in their dynastic shrine in Ardabil in northwestern Iran.15 Safavid mission- ary agents recruited Turkmen nomadic tribes willing to fight in the name of the Safavid savior. These soldiers were called the Qizilbash, a Turkish Fragments Volume 3 (2013–2014) 4 MOIN: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness word meaning redheads, for the color of the headgear they wore as a sign of their submission to their Safavid leader and “perfect guide” (murshid-i kamil).
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